Into the Wild

I walked back home from work via a different route so as not to run into the woman I like. I've written about her before. Since that post I've started exchanging a few words with her. Then it dawned on me last Friday, when I saw her see me approaching and then quickly cross to the opposite side of the street, that she is terrified of me. Preferring not to read all that fear on the screen of her face, which is inevitably one's own projection, I am now going to walk home along 15th Avenue until I get to East Cherry and then drop down to 12th Avenue. One nice thing about that route is there's a wonderful vacant lot on the southwest corner of East Jefferson and 15th Avenue. Brambles and shin-high grass. A city residential plot left to nature. A wildlife habitat next to a busy east-west corridor equidistant between Seattle University and Swedish Medical Center. Every block in every residential neighborhood in the city should have one; and I'm not talking about a pea patch. There should be one of those every block, too.